Driverless truck lurches out of lab

[shain from kane]

By DINESH RAMDE
AP Business Writer
http://www.bnd.com/243/story/142729.html

OSHKOSH, Wis. --Sitting high in the cab of the hulking lime-green TerraMax truck, a driver can be excused for instinctively grabbing the steering wheel.

There's no need. TerraMax is a self-driving vehicle, a prototype designed to navigate and obey traffic rules - all while the people inside, if there are any, do anything but drive.

During a recent test on property owned by manufacturer Oshkosh Truck Co., TerraMax barreled down a dusty road with its driver seat empty. It stopped at a four-way intersection and waited as staged traffic resolved before obediently lurching on its way.

If the Defense Department gets its way, vehicles like TerraMax - about as long as a typical sport utility vehicle and almost twice as high - could represent the future of transportation for the military's ground forces.
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In 2001 Congress mandated that one in three ground combat vehicles be self-driving by 2015. The idea is to free personnel for nondriving tasks such as reading maps, scanning for roadside bombs or scouting for the enemy - and to be able to deploy vehicles altogether unoccupied.

The military's research arm turned to industry and academia to help meet that goal. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has sponsored a series of contests since 2003 in which prototype vehicles must navigate rough terrain and avoid obstacles.
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The software that controls TerraMax is Oshkosh's own. Teledyne Technologies Inc. company Teledyne Scientific Co. in Thousand Oaks, Calif., provided the path-planning technology, and VisLab at Parma University in Italy developed the vision systems.
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On a recent afternoon, Oshkosh chief engineer John Beck programmed a course into TerraMax's onboard computer. The monitor displayed the truck's proposed path and a 360-degree view of its surroundings. External objects showed up as ambiguous red squiggles.
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"What's weird, though - it's not that comfortable when you step out of it and tell it to go by itself," he said. "For some reason it's a lot more scary watching it drive when there's no one in the cab. I don't know why."
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"Everybody's extremely competitive," he said. "We're so much further, the entire industry, than it was just two or three years ago. It's absolutely incredible how advanced the technology has become."
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Teledyne Technologies Inc.? What was the name of that tech firm in those Terminator movies? Is this scary or not, and all brought to you by the Defense Department? I worry about blind people crossing the desert.

[MADem]

1. Does it speed up when someone starts shooting at it?

I can see a future where "Suicide By TerraMax" (throwing oneself under the wheels) replaces the old suicide by bus driver or suicide by cop.

This is actually a sensible idea. It even has applications in civilian society. I'm sure parents would rather have TerraMax driving their kids to school than THIS bus driver: http://www.wbir.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=33420

[shain from kane]

4. Johnnycab(from Total Recall). It would end that excuse "Well, I can always get a job driving a truck

or a cab" for flunking out of school.

[liberal N proud]

2. TerraMax - how appropriate

:rofl:

[shain from kane]

3. Or as we say, Terra, Terra, Terra. n/t